recompiling php with --enable-zip parameter

Today I tried to install the eFront LMS. The install failed because the zip facility was missing. On investingating this matter I discover that we can add zip to php by recompiling with the enable-zip parameter.

If I understand things properly it is not a big deal to add a parameter to php. The php.net instructions suggest that only steps 10, 11, 12 need to be followed, and that only a restart of php is needed rather than a recompile.

That sounds good! Trouble is that the files on the vps seem to be located differently to the guidelines from php.net. I can't even find the right place to run the ./configure --help command.

I am sure this is quite an easy matter to sort out, but I am terribly cautious about changing files above root and would appreciate it if someone could give me some advice.

Actually, I have missed the zip facility on the westhost vps after using both tar and zip on our cpanel setup, so I think this is a good opportunity to find out how to add it - and other parameters.

Thank you once again Wildjoker. eFront comes with both installations for Windows and Linux, so that is not a problem.

I was certainly not happy about fiddling with php so am not at all surprised that westhost has denied us this opportunity - even on our own vps. On the other hand, this then means that we are unable to add ANY php parameter not included in the initial setup.

I will put in a ticket to support to see if they can help. I will also inform efrontlearning of this difficulty. It should be something they can sort out themselves. Other LMSs such as Moodle also use zip files. Moodle have obviously managed to include this in their own coding.

I then wondered about this pecl command. Is it for installing php extensions?
I have previously had problems loading the ming extension (that Shawn solved), so I tried pecl install ming - but that didn't work.

I looked on php.net for information about pecl but got no hits. I presume that pecl is an in house command. Does it do anything else that might be useful for us to know about?

I think I will bother support again to find out which extensions we can install via pecl.

The main reason for my continuing with this is the amount of time the pecl install saved us. Compare the couple of minutes installing the zip extension via pecl with the hours of fiddling about trying to install the ming extension and it becomes very clear that the more php extensions we can add via pecl the better!

I have now been in contact with support and asked if they can give us some clearer guidelines on using pecl for php extensions. pecl is clearly very useful and saves a lot of time, so will probably be of interest for others.

As a footnote to this post about zips, I then thought it would be useful to be able to create zips directly on our vps. Here follows a couple of useful links:

The first link talks a bit about pecl and the zip extension and gives some examples:devzone.zend.com